It Pays to Be Popular: a Study of Civilian Assistance and Guerilla Warfare

This paper presents a study into the benefits imparted by friendly civilian populaces in assisting peacekeepers to conduct operations under the threat of guerrilla warfare. In this study, civilians report observed insurgent activity to peacekeepers with varying levels of enthusiasm depending on the reputation of the peacekeepers with the local populace. A simulation model is developed using an agent-based approach and a statistically significant number of Monte Carlo simulations conducted to measure the success of the peacekeeping operations and the benefits of civilian assistance.Peacekeeping, Insurgency, Agent-Based

The polyharmonic heat flow of closed plane curves

In this paper we consider the polyharmonic heat flow of a closed curve in the plane. Our main result is that closed initial data with initially small normalised oscillation of curvature and isoperimetric defect flows exponentially fast in the C^infty-topology to a simple circle. Our results yield a characterisation of the total amount of time during which the flow is not strictly convex, quantifying in a sense the failure of the maximum principle.Comment: 23 page

Nondestructive evaluation of concrete bridge columns rehabilitiated with fiber reinforced polymers using digital tap hammer and infrared thermography

Nondestructive Evaluation of Concrete Bridge Columns Rehabilitated With Fiber Reinforced Polymers Using Digital Tap Hammer and Infrared Thermography Andrew Wheeler In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave bridges in the U.S. a C+ rating. Almost four out of every ten bridges are 50 years or older. In 2016, there were on average 188 million trips across a structural deficient bridge each day. With such a large number of bridges needing replaced or repaired, transportation officials are utilizing various bridge rehabilitation techniques to provide a cost effective solution to such a widespread problem. One rehabilitation technique involves the application of Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) composite wraps to strengthen various bridge components. The initial and in-service, evaluation and acceptance of such FRP systems are crucial to their overall success and serviceability. Previously, several traditional methods such as visual inspection and coin tap testing of FRP composites were accepted as common practice for inspecting the quality of material and structural components. This type of evaluation was very subjective and dependent on the inspector\u27s level of experience. More recently, nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques can identify internal or external defects without affecting the form, or function of a structure. Digital Tap Hammer testing and Infrared Thermography (IRT) are two commonly used NDT techniques for field evaluation of civil infrastructure, because these techniques are user friendly and highly mobile. This problem report reviews the recent advances on the applications of digital tap hammer testing and infrared thermography at identifying defects in various elements of infrastructure and FRP composite wraps applied to bridge columns in southern West Virginia. Additionally, this report includes information on process of repairing dilapidated reinforced concrete columns in preparation for the installation of a FRP system. All of this will serve as a demonstration of how crucial non-destructive evaluation (NDE) is to the success of FRP bridge rehabilitation. Furthermore, the conclusions indicate a need for NDE to ensure quality control of field rehabilitation projects

LLC Fiduciaries: Where Has All the Good Faith Gone?

This is the published version

2017-2018 New Music Festival

Twelfth Annual New Music Festival Scott Wheeler, Composer-in-Residence Lisa Leonard, Director Friday, January 19, 2018 at 7:30 pm Spotlight I: Young Composers Saturday, January 20, 2018 at 1:00 pm Master Class with Scott Wheeler Sunday, January 21, 2018 at 4:00 pm Spotlight II: Scott Wheeler Commissioned Work Nightingale: Scenes from a Ballet by Scott Wheeler. The full score is displayed in the Creative Works collection.https://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_newmusicfest/1000/thumbnail.jp

Utilizing Smartphone Resources with Homesite Insurance

The process of providing real estate information about a property, a central component of purchasing homeowner’s insurance, is a lengthy, complicated procedure that has a large capacity for error on the part of the customer providing the information. Because of advances in information technology, including the storage, processing, and presentation of information of all kinds, this process can be handled in ways that are faster, less prone to error, and easier to use in the absence of specialist knowledge. The goal of this project was to explore these technological advances in order to identify strategies that could be used to achieve the aforementioned improvements in such a way that a casual user of the app could handle the process with little difficulty and with reliable results

Experimental Real-time Heuristic Search Results in a Video Game

In real-time domains such as video games, a planning algorithm has a strictly bounded time before it must return the next action for the agent to execute. We introduce a realistic video game benchmark domain that is useful for evaluating real-time heuristic search algorithms. Unlike previous benchmarks such as grid pathfinding and the sliding tile puzzle, this new domain includes dynamics and induces a directed graph. Using both the previous and new domains, we investigate several enhancements to a leading real-time search algorithm, LSS-LRTA*. We show experimentally that 1) it is not difficult to outperform A * when optimizing goal achievement time, 2) it is better to plan after each action than to commit to multiple actions or to use a dynamically sized lookahead, 3) A*-based lookahead can cause undesirable actions to be selected, and 4) on-line de-biasing of the heuristic can lead to improved performance. We hope that this new domain and results will stimulate further research on applying real-time search to dynamic real-time domains

A Survey of Health Management User Objectives Related to Diagnostic and Prognostic Metrics

One of the most prominent technical challenges to effective deployment of health management systems is the vast difference in user objectives with respect to engineering development. In this paper, a detailed survey on the objectives of different users of health management systems is presented. These user objectives are then mapped to the metrics typically encountered in the development and testing of two main systems health management functions: diagnosis and prognosis. Using this mapping, the gaps between user goals and the metrics associated with diagnostics and prognostics are identified and presented with a collection of lessons learned from previous studies that include both industrial and military aerospace applications